One of the best investments I made this school year was a whopping $6 purchase at Goodwill back in October. Telephones! With a cord, making them "old-fashioned" of course.

They've been great fun and a huge motivator for kids to get speaking. It's pretty easy to customize a short, easy-to-memorize dialogue based on whatever unit we're studying and the kids get so excited when they come out of my panier magique. On Halloween we used the phones to make monster prank calls and practice saying "J'ai peur !!" My other favorite dialogue is a short one I use during the body unit to practice naming body parts. It looks like this:

I have a two volunteers come up, one to play the doctor and the other to play the patient. The patient draws a card from a pile with a picture of a body part on it and then conversation ensues.

Souffrant : Paris, 1-2-3-4 ! (dialing)
Médecin : Allo ?
Souffrant : J'ai mal !
Médecin : Où ?
Souffrant : Au pied (or according to the card).
Médecin : Dommage ! (il raccroche)

The premise of the negligent doctor who responds, "Too bad!" to the patient's complaints will never not be hilarious for children and they love to see just how evil they can make the doctor sound or how painful they can make the patient's "J'ai mal". Moral of the story: got telephones, kids will speak!

Bandes dessinées! What could be more fun?? I hand drew one of these templates on a whim one day and have already used them more than a few times, and at a couple different grade levels. You can switch up the format and dialogue depending on the subject, and leave more or less of the text blank to differentiate for abilities and age.

For this particular one, first graders had just been introduced to emotion vocabulary. We spent the first week practicing and playing games with "Je suis...", so they were accustomed to that format. The dialogue should look something like this:

-Bonjour!

-Bonjour!

-Comment ça va?

-Je suis ______________ . (triste, heureux, surpris, effrayé, ravi, etc.)

The fun part is filling in the thought bubble, since students get to decide what happened to the stick figure that day to make them feel a certain way and draw in the scenario (using lots of color of course!). I leave the template pretty basic on purpose, so when I get those kids who finish way earlier than the rest, I ask them to keep embellishing with expressive faces, clothing on the stick people, borders, etc.

Cute factor: 8/10
Happy doodling!